Blu’s revival

Blu fans take heart: A Tokyopop editor reveals that neither Love Mode nor Gakuen Heaven has been cancelled outright, although solicitations for both were listed as “cancelled” (which may mean postponed) in the July Previews. Vol. 10 of Love Mode is due out in August. “If it sells as well as volume 9 or better, it will be very difficult for us to not do volume 11,” said the Blu editor who goes by the nom de forum Shonen-Ai-Samurai. (Blu Forums are here, but you have to be 18 and register to read them.) I haven’t been to the Blu website for a while, so I was pleasantly surprised at how well constructed it was compared to the main Tokyopop site. I found the book I was looking for right away, and the catalog description linked to the Amazon page in case I might want to, you know, buy it or something.

At Precocious Curmudgeon, David Welsh lists his picks from this week’s new comics.

The 2008 Harvey nominations are up, and the immediate question among manga fans is: “What were they smoking?” For the best American edition of foreign material category, the judges looked over a year that saw the publication of Tekkonkinkreet, Mushishi, Osamu Tezuka’s MW, To Terra, Tokyo Is My Garden, and significant chunks of Emma, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, and After School Nightmare, not to mention NBM’s beautiful edition of Run, Bong-gu Run, and opted for the manga version Romeo and Juliet, which is pretty good but not exactly original, and the hideously drawn Witchblade, which is based on an American comic. You get the feeling that the judges felt grudgingly obligated to pick some of that manga stuff so they just threw a dart at a stack of old Previews. David Welsh is aghast at the Witchblade nomination at Precocious Curmudgeon. (Illustration: The anatomically improbable cover of vol. 1 of Witchblade.)

Translators Alethea and Athena Nibley discuss the fine points of English adaptations at Manga Life.

JP Meyer links to a download of that manga about the USS Washington, which was produced by the U.S. Navy and originally published in Japanese.

Attention Bizenghast fans: There’s a preview of volume 5 up at MySpace.

News from Japan: Yu Yagami, creator of Hikkatsu!, Dokkoida?!, and Those Who Hunt Elves, is starting a new manga serial, Dageki Joi Saori, about a doctor who wields a mean bat, in Comic Charge magazine.